101 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ON THE EUCHARIST
by Giles Dimock, O.P.
Paulist Press, 2006
138 pages, $14.95
To order: 1- 800-218-1903
Paulistpress.com

From the Jewish background of the Eucharistic celebration to the relationship of the Mass to the eternal banquet in heaven, this small but potent volume in a question-and-answer format covers most anything you would want to know about what the Second Vatican Council calls “the source and summit of the Christian life.”

Written by Dominican Father Giles Dimock, a member of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, the book draws upon a host of sources to provide concise but complete answers to common questions about the Eucharist. Sacred Scripture and the Catechism of the Catholic Church are the bedrock sources, but Father Dimock also cites Church Fathers, Church councils, encyclicals and other papal documents, and the practices and writings of the great saints of the Eucharist.

Here is how he explains the terms “substance” and “accident:” “The Church teaches that the substance of the bread changes, and that means the deepest reality of the bread changes and becomes the body of Christ, even though the accidents or appearances are the same color, texture, taste, etc. Substance, philosophically, is being in itself, whereas appearances can only be in something: One never simply sees a ‘red.’ … In this substantial change the accidents of both bread and wine remain the same, but on the deepest level of the being of these elements there is a change, so that the substance of bread and wine no longer remain, but only Jesus: body and blood, soul and divinity, according to the teaching of the Church.”

The author also tackles hot-button issues such as women’s ordination. In one of the longest answers in the book, Father Dimock begins by affirming the essential dignity and equality of women, citing Pope John Paul II’s Mulieris Dignitatem (The Dignity and Vocation of Women). He then bases his answer on unchanging tradition and practice — “the Church, whether East or West, has never done this [ordained women] or thought of it, whereas heretical groups in the early Church had done so.”

He speaks of the priest as acting at Mass in persona Christi capitis (in the person of Christ the head) and concludes with the fact that, since Jesus was true man, only a man can adequately serve as an efficacious sign of Christ during the consecration. The author also says only women can become consecrated virgins because men “cannot be the sign of Mother Church bringing to birth from the ‘womb’ of the baptismal font new neophytes or children for God.”

“Could it be,” he asks, “that the complementarity of man and woman in the order of nature is also found in the order of the supernatural?”

Father Dimock also tackles the more common pastoral questions: worthiness to receive Communion and mortal sin; receiving Communion in Orthodox or Protestant wedding ceremonies; receiving the host on the tongue or in the hand, etc.

The one significant weakness is that the book lacks an index of terms that would help the reader locate a topic quickly. Although the table of contents helpfully lists all 101 questions under 11 headings, I still found it difficult to find a particular issue. An index of important words would have made this excellent book closer to the perfection of its topic.

Stephen Vincent writes from

Wallingford, Connecticut.